8 ms·

Desert plants are struggling in higher heat

67 points by LinuxBender 5y ago

datameta 5y ago
I think perhaps the gravity of the situation concerning all ecosystems could be illustrated effectively if government "open comment" boxes were effectively ddos'd with articles like these from all manner of publications. Major systemic change is necessary from the top down. The individual environmentally conscious contribution, even if widespread, can certainly help but it cannot outstrip the negative pattern of a well organized pervasive attitude that does not take findings like those in the article into account.
- ianai 5y ago
  Just write your representatives in Congress, the President, and participate in your civic duties. DOS’ing some poor saps inbox isn’t it. Edit-Also be polite. No death threats…
  - datameta 5y ago
    Absolutely. Polite discourse is the most effective way. Often it's better to write nothing at all than to write something in anger. I was modeling my thoughts on the hundreds of thousands of Net Neutrality comments that were received by the FCC a few years ago. That they doctored the perception (using bots) that the proportion of submissions against upholding net neutrality was higher than it really was is another story..
  - the8472 5y ago
    > No death threats… Carbon footprint reduction is inevitable. Your choice, Mr. Congressman, is whether it will be smaller shoes or fewer feet.
- mistrial9 5y ago
  hm.. bad advice? Panic and fear block intelligence. Public-facing orgs get messaging all the time, by definition, so they are already in some state driven by self-interest, requirements, motivations and ability, to be overly general. Instigating panic, fear, dread and a host of other human responses, by "agitating" .. is a physical option and really courts disasters of all kinds. On the other hand, many thousands of reports generated in the last two decades, is also apparently not enough either. Alert! Aware! .. and encourage, analyze, communicate.
  - datameta 5y ago
    Agreed.. My point is not to overwhelm a key figure/government body emotionally but rather highlight that it isn't that every so and so often there is a finding of this nature but rather that they happen all the time and from all sources. So that partisanship cannot be easily used to dismiss the information.
- neom 5y ago
  I thought a good idea might be to get some very very talented ux/ui/illustration folks together with a few people who are well versed in the various aspects of climate change, and take the time to make a very succinct, easy to understand and beautiful microsite that shows the coalescing of all of the aspects of change that result in a crisis. I think if people can see them all together and understand how the positive feedback loops are connected, it would help people think individually about what aspects they could realistically tackle, as well as the magnitude of the problem. People can very clearly see the system is falling to bits, but I'm not sure most people understand it's actually a group of interconnected systems. I mean, they know, but I don't believe it's easy for people to wrap a mental model around all this. I also think there are still very many people who believe it will not affect them meaningfully within their lifetime.
  - datameta 5y ago
    This idea if well executed and spread virally could be rather effective. I have seen how useful a properly put together website has been in helping organize efforts in contacting representatives, increasing voter turnout, and scheduling protests.
    - neom 5y ago
      I agree it would need to be very well executed, but there are some strong minds around. You'd need a great domain and really great team, and some press (even if just tweets from people with huge followings).
  - doitLP 5y ago
    Please do this. Everything from kelp forests dying to bug populations diasappearing to the unsustainable mining of gravel needs to be displayed in a way that really communicates the breakneck pace at which we’re headed for doom. But it needs to be presented in an exquisitely wel-done, bare-facts way that ends with a CTA (unlike for example Kurzgesagt which is just depressing) I bet a lot of people would like to help for free. Most of us feel helpless most of the time.
    - 5y ago
- ajuc 5y ago
  They already know, it's just that fossil fuel industry sends checks not articles.
- throwanem 5y ago
  Good luck DDOSing /dev/null.
- jfengel 5y ago
  Everyone in the government already has all of the facts. They are not unaware of it, or of the gravity of the situation. It's just that some of them don't believe it, and were voted in by supporters who don't believe it. They aren't going to turn around to their constituents and say "huh, turns out climate change is real and bad, so I'm going to do the opposite of what I promised when you voted for me." No amount of scholarship will ever change that. As for what will... search me. It seems to be self-reinforcing at this point. Maybe the steady drumbeat of articles like this will help change the minds of ordinary people, though I can't see how.
lisper 5y ago
Why would this be unexpected? Just because desert plants can endure conditions that seem difficult to us doesn't mean that small changes in the environments that they evolved to survive in should not result in conditions that are difficult for them. The Sahara was a grassy savannah for a while before the last round of climate change [1]. [1] https://www.livescience.com/4180-sahara-desert-lush-populated.html https://www.livescience.com/4180-sahara-desert-lush-populate...
- furgooswft13 5y ago
  If it's unexpected it's scarier.
- syops 5y ago
  There are people who deny the effects of climate change and/or deny that it is occurring. Melting ice and desert plants not being able to survive in the desert are indications that change is happening and such indications can't be reasonably believed to be a liberal conspiracy.
saalweachter 5y ago
I'll believe this is unexpected because I'm not a plant-ologist and don't really have well-calibrated expectations of desert plant response to temperature, but -- Isn't it like a known thing that photosynthesis stops happening at higher temperatures? I've been worried about the impact of days-over-100-degrees on crop production for years. Is "unexpected" in this headline standing in for "now demonstrated in the wild, counter-intuitive if you don't know that biology is highly sensitive to temperature, expected by people in the field", or if I knew more about desert plant biology, would I be more shocked than I am now?
pvaldes 5y ago
Not so unexpected in fact, and more complex than just "desert plants are dying". ψ
- defterGoose 5y ago
  Nothing ν, unfortunately
lisper 5y ago
The scariest thing to me about climate change is the rate at which it is happening. We bought a house in the Bay Area 11 years ago. It didn't have air conditioning. The builder said we wouldn't need it. We added a unit anyway and for the first few years we barely used it, maybe one or two weeks out of the year to cool the top floor on exceptionally hot days, which back then was the low 90s. Since then, 100-plus-degree days have been happening more and more regularly. We're adding a second AC unit because there have been days that the first one just can't keep up. All this in 11 years. This keeps me up at night too: https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/17/us/earth-trapped-heat-doubled/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/17/us/earth-trapped-heat-doubled... There was a time when I was fairly sure that climate change would lead to the collapse of civilization, but there was no way I'd live to see it. Now I'm not so sure about the latter. [UPDATE] There is also the sobering realization that even if we brought carbon emissions to zero tomorrow (which is obviously not going to happen) even that would not actually solve the problem. We're at 50% over pre-industrial CO2 with no viable way of getting rid of it, so at best it's going to stay that way for a long, long time.
- darkerside 5y ago
  CO2 stays in the atmosphere for a long time, but things like methane break down much more quickly. In the short term, we'll have better luck by reducing methane as well. Of course we'll still need to cut carbon over the longer term, but it's not as dire as you think.
  - lisper 5y ago
    > it's not as dire as you think. I would like nothing more than for you to be right about this. But I don't think you are. We're at 420PPM CO2 right now. Even if we cut CO2 emissions to zero and eliminated all methane emissions, we'd still be retaining heat at a rate that is more than enough to produce a blue-ocean event [1] in the next decade or two, after which we're probably screwed. [1] https://glennfay.medium.com/the-blue-ocean-event-will-be-a-tipping-point-for-our-climate-42c05898862c https://glennfay.medium.com/the-blue-ocean-event-will-be-a-t...
    - 5y ago
aurizon 5y ago
I wonder if people with missile tech will destroy all coal and gas generating plants - even those in foreign countries = the beginning of climate wars. The USA/China/Russia could do this now - if they wanted to? Might be a good movie script in that as well?
- klyrs 5y ago
  If China wanted to get rid of coal power plants, they'd probably stop building them first.
- furgooswft13 5y ago
  lol targeting ICBMs at China and Russia will surely help stop global warming
  - fogihujy 5y ago
    Yeah, but I'm not sure a nuclear winter is preferable...
    - bruce343434 5y ago
      To be fair, it would cool things down
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
sabujp 5y ago
Desert plants as we know them today
dr_dshiv 5y ago
I'm really interested in cloud seeding for localized reduction in solar radiation. This approach works well for oceans... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_cloud_brightening https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_cloud_brightening I suppose that we might start treating the earth like a garden we need to take care of?
mythrwy 5y ago
This article is a bit light on substance. The meat of it appears to be the following: Satellite photos show decline in vegetative cover in the Sonoran desert between 1984 and 2017. Therefore" `Dryland ecosystems "may be more susceptible to climate change than expected,"` Has the temperature of the Sonoran desert changed significantly enough in that period of time to explain this decreased vegetation? Doubtful. How about rainfall? Maybe, likely not. So what has changed in the Sonoran desert in the last 30 years? One thing right off the bat, a massive influx of people as the Phoenix/Tucson areas have grown tremendously. Maybe that is something to look at? Is there more human activity (for example ATVs) in these fragile habitats? More air pollution (yes there is that). More of something else? To really show warming was causing this decrease in vegetation they would need to show a mechanism that caused it to occur. And quantify it. i.e "Palo Verde trees die when the average nighttime temperature is above XX or annual rainfall is below YY". But nope, they don't do that.

67 points by LinuxBender 5y ago

I think perhaps the gravity of the situation concerning all ecosystems could be illustrated effectively if government "open comment" boxes were effectively ddos'd with articles like these from all manner of publications. Major systemic change is necessary from the top down. The individual environmentally conscious contribution, even if widespread, can certainly help but it cannot outstrip the negative pattern of a well organized pervasive attitude that does not take findings like those in the article into account.

ianai 5y ago
Just write your representatives in Congress, the President, and participate in your civic duties. DOS’ing some poor saps inbox isn’t it. Edit-Also be polite. No death threats…
- datameta 5y ago
  Absolutely. Polite discourse is the most effective way. Often it's better to write nothing at all than to write something in anger. I was modeling my thoughts on the hundreds of thousands of Net Neutrality comments that were received by the FCC a few years ago. That they doctored the perception (using bots) that the proportion of submissions against upholding net neutrality was higher than it really was is another story..
- the8472 5y ago
  > No death threats… Carbon footprint reduction is inevitable. Your choice, Mr. Congressman, is whether it will be smaller shoes or fewer feet.
mistrial9 5y ago
hm.. bad advice? Panic and fear block intelligence. Public-facing orgs get messaging all the time, by definition, so they are already in some state driven by self-interest, requirements, motivations and ability, to be overly general. Instigating panic, fear, dread and a host of other human responses, by "agitating" .. is a physical option and really courts disasters of all kinds. On the other hand, many thousands of reports generated in the last two decades, is also apparently not enough either. Alert! Aware! .. and encourage, analyze, communicate.
- datameta 5y ago
  Agreed.. My point is not to overwhelm a key figure/government body emotionally but rather highlight that it isn't that every so and so often there is a finding of this nature but rather that they happen all the time and from all sources. So that partisanship cannot be easily used to dismiss the information.
neom 5y ago
I thought a good idea might be to get some very very talented ux/ui/illustration folks together with a few people who are well versed in the various aspects of climate change, and take the time to make a very succinct, easy to understand and beautiful microsite that shows the coalescing of all of the aspects of change that result in a crisis. I think if people can see them all together and understand how the positive feedback loops are connected, it would help people think individually about what aspects they could realistically tackle, as well as the magnitude of the problem. People can very clearly see the system is falling to bits, but I'm not sure most people understand it's actually a group of interconnected systems. I mean, they know, but I don't believe it's easy for people to wrap a mental model around all this. I also think there are still very many people who believe it will not affect them meaningfully within their lifetime.
- datameta 5y ago
  This idea if well executed and spread virally could be rather effective. I have seen how useful a properly put together website has been in helping organize efforts in contacting representatives, increasing voter turnout, and scheduling protests.
  - neom 5y ago
    I agree it would need to be very well executed, but there are some strong minds around. You'd need a great domain and really great team, and some press (even if just tweets from people with huge followings).
- doitLP 5y ago
  Please do this. Everything from kelp forests dying to bug populations diasappearing to the unsustainable mining of gravel needs to be displayed in a way that really communicates the breakneck pace at which we’re headed for doom. But it needs to be presented in an exquisitely wel-done, bare-facts way that ends with a CTA (unlike for example Kurzgesagt which is just depressing) I bet a lot of people would like to help for free. Most of us feel helpless most of the time.
  - 5y ago
ajuc 5y ago
They already know, it's just that fossil fuel industry sends checks not articles.
throwanem 5y ago
Good luck DDOSing /dev/null.
jfengel 5y ago
Everyone in the government already has all of the facts. They are not unaware of it, or of the gravity of the situation. It's just that some of them don't believe it, and were voted in by supporters who don't believe it. They aren't going to turn around to their constituents and say "huh, turns out climate change is real and bad, so I'm going to do the opposite of what I promised when you voted for me." No amount of scholarship will ever change that. As for what will... search me. It seems to be self-reinforcing at this point. Maybe the steady drumbeat of articles like this will help change the minds of ordinary people, though I can't see how.

lisper 5y ago

Why would this be unexpected? Just because desert plants can endure conditions that seem difficult to us doesn't mean that small changes in the environments that they evolved to survive in should not result in conditions that are difficult for them. The Sahara was a grassy savannah for a while before the last round of climate change [1]. [1] https://www.livescience.com/4180-sahara-desert-lush-populated.html https://www.livescience.com/4180-sahara-desert-lush-populate...

furgooswft13 5y ago
If it's unexpected it's scarier.
syops 5y ago
There are people who deny the effects of climate change and/or deny that it is occurring. Melting ice and desert plants not being able to survive in the desert are indications that change is happening and such indications can't be reasonably believed to be a liberal conspiracy.

saalweachter 5y ago

I'll believe this is unexpected because I'm not a plant-ologist and don't really have well-calibrated expectations of desert plant response to temperature, but -- Isn't it like a known thing that photosynthesis stops happening at higher temperatures? I've been worried about the impact of days-over-100-degrees on crop production for years. Is "unexpected" in this headline standing in for "now demonstrated in the wild, counter-intuitive if you don't know that biology is highly sensitive to temperature, expected by people in the field", or if I knew more about desert plant biology, would I be more shocked than I am now?

pvaldes 5y ago

Not so unexpected in fact, and more complex than just "desert plants are dying". ψ

defterGoose 5y ago
Nothing ν, unfortunately

lisper 5y ago

The scariest thing to me about climate change is the rate at which it is happening. We bought a house in the Bay Area 11 years ago. It didn't have air conditioning. The builder said we wouldn't need it. We added a unit anyway and for the first few years we barely used it, maybe one or two weeks out of the year to cool the top floor on exceptionally hot days, which back then was the low 90s. Since then, 100-plus-degree days have been happening more and more regularly. We're adding a second AC unit because there have been days that the first one just can't keep up. All this in 11 years. This keeps me up at night too: https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/17/us/earth-trapped-heat-doubled/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/17/us/earth-trapped-heat-doubled... There was a time when I was fairly sure that climate change would lead to the collapse of civilization, but there was no way I'd live to see it. Now I'm not so sure about the latter. [UPDATE] There is also the sobering realization that even if we brought carbon emissions to zero tomorrow (which is obviously not going to happen) even that would not actually solve the problem. We're at 50% over pre-industrial CO2 with no viable way of getting rid of it, so at best it's going to stay that way for a long, long time.

darkerside 5y ago
CO2 stays in the atmosphere for a long time, but things like methane break down much more quickly. In the short term, we'll have better luck by reducing methane as well. Of course we'll still need to cut carbon over the longer term, but it's not as dire as you think.
- lisper 5y ago
  > it's not as dire as you think. I would like nothing more than for you to be right about this. But I don't think you are. We're at 420PPM CO2 right now. Even if we cut CO2 emissions to zero and eliminated all methane emissions, we'd still be retaining heat at a rate that is more than enough to produce a blue-ocean event [1] in the next decade or two, after which we're probably screwed. [1] https://glennfay.medium.com/the-blue-ocean-event-will-be-a-tipping-point-for-our-climate-42c05898862c https://glennfay.medium.com/the-blue-ocean-event-will-be-a-t...
  - 5y ago

aurizon 5y ago

I wonder if people with missile tech will destroy all coal and gas generating plants - even those in foreign countries = the beginning of climate wars. The USA/China/Russia could do this now - if they wanted to? Might be a good movie script in that as well?

klyrs 5y ago
If China wanted to get rid of coal power plants, they'd probably stop building them first.
furgooswft13 5y ago
lol targeting ICBMs at China and Russia will surely help stop global warming
- fogihujy 5y ago
  Yeah, but I'm not sure a nuclear winter is preferable...
  - bruce343434 5y ago
    To be fair, it would cool things down
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

sabujp 5y ago

Desert plants as we know them today

dr_dshiv 5y ago

I'm really interested in cloud seeding for localized reduction in solar radiation. This approach works well for oceans... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_cloud_brightening https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_cloud_brightening I suppose that we might start treating the earth like a garden we need to take care of?

mythrwy 5y ago

This article is a bit light on substance. The meat of it appears to be the following: Satellite photos show decline in vegetative cover in the Sonoran desert between 1984 and 2017. Therefore" `Dryland ecosystems "may be more susceptible to climate change than expected,"` Has the temperature of the Sonoran desert changed significantly enough in that period of time to explain this decreased vegetation? Doubtful. How about rainfall? Maybe, likely not. So what has changed in the Sonoran desert in the last 30 years? One thing right off the bat, a massive influx of people as the Phoenix/Tucson areas have grown tremendously. Maybe that is something to look at? Is there more human activity (for example ATVs) in these fragile habitats? More air pollution (yes there is that). More of something else? To really show warming was causing this decrease in vegetation they would need to show a mechanism that caused it to occur. And quantify it. i.e "Palo Verde trees die when the average nighttime temperature is above XX or annual rainfall is below YY". But nope, they don't do that.